Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on October 1, 2022

The history of Yom Kippur, explained

A brief explanation of the Jewish holiday Yom Kippurs history.

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Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year in Judaism, is approaching.

The name of the holiday translates from Hebrew to English as the Day of Atonement, and Jewish people may spend the day fasting, attendingsynagogue or observing the holiday in other ways. It follows Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.

Spiritually, they say on Rosh Hashanah it is written, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed, the idea being that everything that's going to happen in the year to come, the stage is set during this time between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Danielle Kranjec, associate vice president of Jewish education at Hillel International, told USA TODAY.

But what is Yom Kippur? When is it this year? Heres what you need to know.

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Yom Kippur, ortheDay of Atonement, iswhen Jews reflect on sins or wrongdoings fromthe previous year. Many Jews will attend services at synagogues or other congregations, reciting special prayers and singing special songs.

During the course of the year, people get off track, Steven T. Katz, the Slaterprofessor of Jewish and Holocaust studies at Boston University, told USA TODAY. They don't keep their obligations. They don't follow the law. They mistreat their neighbors. They are egotistical and self interested. So the object is to try to reassert a kind of camaraderie, reassert a harmonious and ethical relationship between human beings and also between the world above and the world below.

It represents the moment that is established for reorienting ourselves in the right direction. No other festival has quite the same spiritual power as the idea of Yom Kippur, he added.

Some Jewish people mayapologize to friends and loved ones too.

A deeply Jewish idea is that if youve harmed another person, only that person can forgive you, Kranjec said. Many people in the time between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur try to take stock of their relationships and directly ask forgiveness for harm that theyve caused to another person.

Yom Kippur begins at sundown on Tuesday, Oct. 4, and ends in the evening on Wednesday, Oct. 5. It lasts one day, while Rosh Hashanah lasts two days.

One of the most common Yom Kippur traditions is to fast for 25 hours, not eating or drinking from the night Yom Kippur begins into the night it ends.

Kranjec explained that Many Jewish rituals and observances have to do with sensory experiences, whether that's enjoying delicious food that's then elevated with a blessing or another kind of moment of mindfulness.

Yom Kippur is really the one day on the Jewish calendar when Jewish people attempt to transcend the physical limitations of being in a human body, she added.

Some Jewish people also avoid other actions on Yom Kippur, such as bathing, applying makeup, wearing leather shoes or having sex.

These things have a kind of sense of limiting the ego. When you're fasting, you don't feel quite so powerful. You don't feel you're in charge. You don't feel that you're in control. When you don't wear leather shoes, it's a sign, again, of withdrawal, Katz said.

Many Jewish families and communities will gather before Yom Kippur begins and after it ends to have festive meals, to prepare to fast and then to break their fasts together.

Another important observance is the blowing of the shofar, or a curved rams horn. The shofar is soundedceremonially to conclude Yom Kippur, Kranjec said.

That is an important communal moment where the closing prayers of Yom Kippur are said together, and someone blows the ram's horn and everyone hears it together, and then the fast is broken together, she said.

No, saying happy Yom Kippur to your Jewish loved ones doesnt strike quite the right tone, since the holiday isnt typically a joyous one.

In English, you might say to friends or colleagues have a meaningful Yom Kippur, Kranjec said. Focusing on the meaning of the holiday and saying to people have a meaningful fast if you're fasting, or you could even say have a good Yom Kippur, but happy is probably not the right adjective.

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When is Yom Kippur 2022? What is the Jewish holiday? What to know - USA TODAY

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Posted By admin on October 1, 2022

Rabbi Chaim Wilhelm displays blowing of the shofar outside of the Chabad Hebrew School in Northeast Portland on Wednesday, Sept. 28, 2022. (Sean Meagher/The Oregonian)

Celebrations of the High Holy Days have new meaning this year for a Jewish organization that was, in effect, homeless because of the pandemic.

Chabad of Northeast Portland now owns a building on Northeast Ninth Avenue that allowed the community to hold in-person services earlier this week for Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year. Similar services are planned Tuesday for Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement.

We never dreamed any of this was possible, said Rabbi Chaim Wilhelm, executive director of Chabad of Northeast Portland. I believe it was driven by a higher power. I am a rabbi and of course that sounds religious. But thats the reality.

Chabad, a worldwide organization, is not affiliated with a particular synagogue. Instead, leaders work to create a community that gives people the chance to engage with Judaism on their terms.

Wilhem, 36, grew up in Southwest Portland. His grandfather started a Chabad program in California, and his parents started one in Oregon. His wife, Mushka Wilhelm, 33, is a co-director of Chabad of Northeast Portland. Her grandfather started a Chabad in Vermont, where she was raised.

We are a bit of an anomaly, he said. This is part of our DNA.

After high school, Wilhelm attended and graduated from the rabbinical school at Yeshiva University, a private Orthodox Jewish university in New York City. He met his wife in Brooklyn. The couple married and then moved to Portland. They have six boys, ranging in age from 11 to 1. There are 10 Chabad sites in the Portland area, but the couple saw a need for one serving inner Northeast Portland.

Traditionally much of Jewish community has been in Southwest Portland, Chaim Wilhelm said. There are a lot of Jewish people and families in Northeast Portland, and theyre looking to connect where they live.

They started 10 years ago in a 1,400-square-foot building in the 2800 block of Northeast Sandy Boulevard. A variety of programs from toddlers to adults were offered. Then the pandemic hit.

We are all about gathering and that was impossible, said Wilhelm. In March of 2020 everything fell off the cliff.

The group gave up the Sandy Boulevard space and met outside, in backyards and under tents.

We did the best we could, he said. We eventually began looking for a new space we could use when things opened again. We wanted something bigger. You could say that COVID drove all of this. Looking back, it is amazing things happened the way they did.

Wilhelm said he learned about a building for sale at 4635 N.E. Ninth Ave. Once a church, it had been used as a preschool and then a daycare. It featured 9,000 square feet of space, all the room Chabad needed to grow and serve in coming years.

We had to raise money, $1.8 million, to buy it, he said. It was the first time wed held a capital campaign. I cant tell you if it was easy or hard, but we did it.

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The Chabad Hebrew School in Northeast Portland on Wednesday, Sept. 28, 2022. (Sean Meagher/The Oregonian)

A shofar and Machzor prayer book at Chabad Hebrew School in Northeast Portland on Wednesday, Sept. 28, 2022. (Sean Meagher/The Oregonian)

The deal closed Aug. 12 and by Labor Day, Chabad was up and running. He said the building will house a Hebrew School, as well as the only Jewish preschool and Jewish day care center in Northeast Portland. The building will also be a hub for clubs, activities and volunteer opportunities for families and people of all ages. Offerings include summer camps, studying the Torah, shabbat dinners and even a ski trip.

This is a great building, Wilhelm said. We have volunteers coming in at night painting it. We dont have membership. Thats not a prerequisite to engage what already belongs to people, and that is their Jewish heritage. If we reach out, they will come.

The first official event in the new building was a Rosh Hashana service.

Then, Monday evening, Wilhelm, focusing on community outreach, went to Wilshire Park on Northeast 33rd Avenue, to offer up Rosh Hashana prayers, chants called Hassidic melodies, before blowing the shofar, the horns plaintive sound filling the park.

More than 40 people attended, including Jonathan Potkin, 75.

Growing up on New York States Long Island, Potkin was raised in the Jewish faith. As a boy he said he found the traditional services interminable, and he eventually drifted away from the synagogue and organized religion.

He had no interest in attending any traditional High Holy Days services in local synagogues, but he said he found Mondays event in the park unexpectedly meaningful and emotional.

I saw young people and kids there, he said. The next generation. My mother, who passed 30 years ago, felt strongly that the Jewish tradition and culture was worth pursuing. She had an expression dont break the chain to remind me to not completely abandon my upbringing.

The random event in a park just a mile or so from his home, he said, turned out to be bit of a flame within his soul. While he has no plans to join a synagogue, he said Monday reminded him of a great truth in life.

I am touched by things greater than myself, he said. The universe pushed me into a Jewish home at birth. I am grateful for that.

When the low-key ceremony ended, Rabbi Wilhelm circulated through the crowd to greet all who attended. He shook Potkins hand and thanked him for being there.

No, said Potkin, thank you.

During the prayers, Wilhelm said Rosh Hashana is a time to look at the past, to reflect on emotion and love, and contemplate successes, struggles, disappointments and challenges.

And then, he said, it is important to focus on the future and the coming year in the Jewish faith. For Wilhelm, the past year and what he expects to happen in the coming New Year, have been profound.

Our trajectory has been crazy, he said. In so many ways where we are at this moment is because of the pandemic.

Sharon Benedict, 75 and living in Southeast Portland, by chance learned about Chabad of Northeast Portland years ago when she went to Des Moines, Iowa, to visit her mother.

My mother is Jewish, but she did not raise me in the faith, said Benedict. My father was Catholic. In those days, after the war, people wanted to blend in, and I never learned a thing about Judaism.

One day, Benedict craved a pastrami sandwich and found it in a Des Moines deli run by a rabbi affiliated with a Des Moines Chabad.

Id never heard of Chabad, she said. We talked and he filled me with such Jewish pride. I told him if there was a rabbi like him in Portland I would go to a Chabad. He told me there was a rabbi there who was better than he was.

It turned out to be Rabbi Wilhelm.

Benedict became involved at Chabad of Northeast Portland. She attends events, volunteers and learned how to make challah bread. Within the Jewish faith, she said, the bread is considered part of the mitzvah, or good deed, when it is offered to others.

I now make 32 loaves a week that we give away to people, she said, adding it is all part of the outreach mission to connect with the Jewish community.

She doesnt consider Chabad and the new building a house of worship, describing it as a learning center to reconnect her, through other people who are exploring their faith, to her past.

My faith was very flat for a long time, she said. This has put a spark back in my heart.

Tom Hallman Jr.

503-221-8224; thallman@oregonian.com; @thallmanjr

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Chabad of Northeast Portland celebrates High Holy Days and a new home - Here is Oregon

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Posted By admin on October 1, 2022

Its the time of year where so many feel alone.

This beautiful season of fall holds so much promise when we look at it. The colors, the air changes to a breathable refreshing crisp, it's as though a soothing comfort has arrived for Gods creation. So in its beauty, why also is it the time where so many (myself included for a time) struggle with depression, anxiety and loneliness.

I want to offer some encouragement today as you read this. You are not alone. You can do this. You are stronger than you think you are. How do I know? Because for years I too struggled with depression and feeling alone. I know all too well the darkness that for some hides in the beauty of fall.

I know how much strength you have to muster up just to put on a smile for someone you care about so they won't worry. How simple tasks like showering and eating can be hard to accomplish. I know how loud the chaos in your thoughts are. How sometimes the numbness can be incapacitating. You're not alone.

God doesn't want this for you and he knows your pain. Isaiah 53:1-4 speaks of the coming Messiah. Jesus Christ was a man who knew sorrows and was well-acquainted with grief. What does Isaiah mean by sorrows? The Hebrew word means: being in mental pain and anguish. What did he mean by grief? The Hebrew word means: is a sickness or disease characterized by malady, anxiety and calamity. Sound familiar?

I am bringing this up for a hope-filled reason. You see, when I was drowning in my depression and loved ones wanted to help, it didn't no matter how much they loved me. They just couldn't relate. It wasn't until I was brave enough to get help and find those who understood that there was no rational logic to what I felt or thought. When I did thats when light entered my darkness.

Its comforting knowing someone understands. Lean on God he knows what you're going through. The things that make no sense make sense to him. Trust him and his guidance. Our strength will fail but he offers us his and says, I can do all things through him who strengthens me. Philippians 4:13 Meaning you don't have to provide the strength he will for you. Deep breath, you're not alone. You can do this. Your strong cause he is strong for you.

Lydia Rasor is an assistant pastor at New Fire Ministries. The church can be found at 210 Triangle Drive, Suite A, Ponderay; or online at newfireministriesinc.com.

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You are never alone - Bonner County Daily Bee

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Posted By admin on October 1, 2022

Parashat Vayelech (Deuteronomy 31:1-31:30)

Let me set the scene for you.

On a well-worn, hand-me-down couch in the basement of a church youth room in Alabama sits a 17-year-old girl, eating donuts amongst lifelong friends (a Sunday ritual), on the precipice of the biggest change of her life thus far: college.

Raised in the heart of the Bible Belt, a sheltered but curious PK (pastors kid), she was certain about her devotion to her faith once she left home; and, even though she had no idea what life would present her with, she was certain that God was real, that her faith was of utmost importance, even as she expected the new season to be a test of faithfulness.

Going to college would be the first new land she would enter all on her own, without the companionship and guidance of her mom, dad, brothers, and other spiritual mentors. Having committed to a high-achievement, liberal arts school that prioritized critical and Socratic thought, she anticipated being exposed to many new ideas; she wondered which of her thoughts and beliefs she would hold onto and which shed let go.

However, it seemed like there was little room for mistakes; little freedom for roaming, wrestling, and the like if she expected to stay grounded in God, as they say in the Evangelical South. Having heard stories of exploration from others who had already launched into this season of individuation, a curiosity stirred inside her about what life might look like without God and her strict moral compass. But, with anxiety about what newness lay ahead, she decided she needed God more than ever, and so fastened her heart on all she had known, trusted, believed, experienced, and received from her spiritual elders and community.

Leaving home and going to college would require strength and courage. So, on that well-worn couch in the youth room, when her Sunday School teacher instructed her to choose a scripture from the Bible to be her theme verse for this exciting and scary new season, she reached into the deep pocket of stories and words passed down to her and chose Deuteronomy 31:6.

Be strong and courageous! Neither fear, nor be dismayed, for the Lord, your God is the One Who goes with you. God will neither fail you, nor forsake you.

God will fulfill Gods promises. God will be with you! Having chosen this theme verse, her community joined her in encouragement by inscribing this message in many forms for her to post around her dorm room as a reminder of Gods faithfulness.

What encouragement it gave her to know that God would never leave or forsake her! What a comforting image that God went before the Israelite people and that she, too, could expect God to go before and with her into this next chapter of life.

That 17-year-old girl was me. And now, twenty years later, that girl and the life and faith she had experienced looks very different than the one held by that girl in a Sunday School room two decades before. Nonetheless, my faith continues to be of utmost importance.

In all honesty, much of God and Gods holy texts elicit confusion for me. Even though the sentiments and promises inscribed on my graduation gifts are echoed throughout Parashat Vayelech, (see Deuteronomy 31:7, 31:8 and 31:23), I have questioned a God who promises not to forsake us and who has created us to live in a world that is seemingly characterized by brokenness of every kindboth within and outside of ourselves.

I can easily locate compassion and empathy for the confusing emotions that Moses, Joshua, and the Israelite people might have experienced at this tender juncture, and the wandering, doubt, and vulnerability God foreshadows in Deuteronomy.

Little did I know that the world I was being launched into was far more complex than anyone ever told me. No one ever said, Yes, God will be with you, and sometimes youll feel completely abandoned, alone, unsure about everything you used to know or believe. Yes, God is with you, and you will experience great loss and trials and sometimes wonder if youre being punished for a lack of faith. Yes, God is with you, and sometimes youll be so deeply afraid of the uncertainty in this life that youll go looking for just an ounce of control, stability, and identity far outside the arms, love, and faithfulness of God.

Little did I know that over time, my relationship with and image of God would slowly evolve through erosion to one simple and powerful Truth: God is with us.

These inner reflections of my own seem to mirror a central reality of the human experience for all people: we are vulnerable. In the interreligious high school program I direct, the Dignity Project Fellowship, youth from different backgrounds find commonality in their very humanness; in both the beautiful and painful experiences of the world. We seek to acknowledge the complexity of our own stories and learn to engage one anothers complexity with curiosity and hope.

In more recent years, my disorientation, deconstruction, and confusion have mostly evolved to an acceptance and celebration of mystery. It is the with-ness and mystery of God on which I have come to center my faith. After the experience of cascading personal and collective loss and uncertainty over the past twenty yearsrevealing the deep vulnerability of our human experiencemy hope about who God is and how God is active in this world continually finds solace in the truth of the word with.

Even when we dont feel it, even when trust is broken, and maybe even when God is angryGod is still with us. This is what makes God, God.

Shelton Oakley Hersey is Program Director of the Dignity Project of the Miller Center for Interreligious Learning & Leadership at Hebrew College. With her husband Scott and two young children, she enjoys living life in Jamaica Plain and loves playing with her family, sharing a slow meal with community, expressing herself through visual art, and reading poetry.

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Posted By admin on October 1, 2022

During a June 30 NYC Council meeting regarding anti-Semitism at the City University of New York (CUNY), Professor James Davis attributed the issue to White Christian nationalism.

The Council meeting came as a response to a number of anti-Semitic incidents at CUNY that Campus Reform has previously reported on, including a resolution passed in Dec. 2021 by the CUNY Law Student Government Association demanding that the university cut all ties with Israel and endorse the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

In a video of the hearing posted to Twitter on Aug. 21 by SAFE CUNY, Professor Davis, who is also the president of a faculty union that previously condemned Israel, downplayed the impact of anti-Semitism from the Left, claiming instead that a rise in white Christian nationalism is to blame for the growing issue.

{snip}

Campus Reform has reported on multiple instances of anti-Semitism on CUNY campuses this year.

In May, for example, anti-Israel activist Nerdeen Kiswani was invited to the CUNY School of Law to deliver a commencement speech, in which she voiced support for the anti-Israel BDS resolution passed in December.

Similarly, the Anti-Zionist Jewish Coalition at CUNY published a letter in August claiming that Israel commits genocide, funds Nazi militia groups, and is a settler colonial regime.

{snip}

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Posted By admin on October 1, 2022

This interview was originally published in German by Monopol Ed.

Which way forward for documentanot just for the fifteenth edition of the global art exhibition, but also in the future? The curator Anselm Franke was a member of documentas advisory team and was supposed to moderate a panel in the now-canceled series We Need to Talk. He speaks to Monopol about the misunderstandings that arise when the conversation turns to the German culture of remembrance, anti-Semitism, and decolonial endeavors, and explains that all of it also has to do with documenta, the German obsession with being world champion, and a gradual profound change in the art world.

Philipp Hindahl: Lets start with the documenta. Sabine Schormann recently resigned from the managing directors post; you were on the team of advisors. Whats left for you to do?

Anselm Franke: We havent had a substantive role for a long time. The assignment of the team around the writer and curator Emily Dische-Becker was to provide the media consulting that became necessary, also at the request of the artists and curators. We helped plan the conversation forum We Need to Talk. But that was canceled, and amid the crisis in which the show has been embroiled ever since, there have been only informal consultations.

PH: A media release stated that the series was suspended until further notice. Is it going to resume?

AF: Our contracts ran out in mid-June. It was initially unclear whether the conversation forum would still take place because the officials wanted to see what the reactions to the show would be. When there was actual anti-Semitic iconography, it was obviously a whole different situation, and one that was extremely difficult for everyone who had tried to defend the exhibition against unwarranted accusations and who found their trust betrayed.

PH: Youre saying that the accusations that were raised before the opening were unwarranted, but other people would say that the anti-Semitic images were a disaster waiting to happen: the Central Council of Jews in Germany had expressed concerns over several participants proximity to BDS as early as January. What do you make of that?

AF: People lump too many things together and ignore finer but important distinctions; some are politically motivated, others just dont know enough or dont make an effort to think clearly. As I see it, the anti-Semitic imagery that was discovered in the Taring Padi banner doesnt justify a blanket suspicion. If you look more closely, it was an isolated incident, and other suspicions have not been borne out or have been contested with good arguments. The dynamic of the media reporting had become completely untethered to the documenta itself and followed its own logic. That includes the conflation of anti-Semitism, postcolonialism, and the curatorial teams approach. ruangrupa was accused of practicing a premodern collectivism. And we have to counter conflations of this sort, because they have disastrous effects on institutions, the German arts landscape, and the broader public discourse. Now some people believe theyve detected a whole number of additional instances of anti-Semitism at the documenta, which has led to false news reports even as these suspicions proved unsupported by the facts. ruangrupa responded the right way, pointing out that the pictures in the 1988 brochure Prsence des femmes, for instance, arent anti-Semitic. But critics stick to their premature categorizations and come up with new accusations. The mission of the team of experts would now be to exercise genuine diligence and publicly explain the revisions at which they arrive. What we need are historically accurate interpretations and iconographic analyses, before people just accept the publicized assessments of this documenta before its even over and the exhibition is definitively buried.

PH: But doesnt it remain hard to explain how these motifs were given room at the documenta and no one was bothered? Which mechanisms must have failed for that to happen?

AF: The failure to recognize the anti-Semitic iconography in Taring Padis banner Peoples Justice early on was certainly scandalous. It manifested a collision of different sensibilities, so the episode also called for a learning process. Nor is it news that theres anti-Semitism in anti-imperialist movements broadly conceived, as in almost any personifying critique of abstract capitalist structures. On the other hand, Germans cant wash their hands of their own history of anti-Semitism by projecting it onto others, like the Palestinian documenta participants. That was what happened in January, when the first accusations surfaced. When people who have lived under military rule in the Israeli-occupied territories for decades and who are deprived of fundamental rights call for a boycott, their motives just arent the same as the Nazis were, the essential difference being that the paranoid and delusional projections of the old European and vlkisch anti-Semitism are divorced from reality. That contrasts with a violent political reality. When people fail to draw that distinction, they open the floodgates to flagrant denials of reality.

PH: Hold on, which reality are you referring to?

AF: When the mere act of invoking international law and pointing out the facts of an occupation is labeled anti-Semitic, thats a license to deny the reality on the ground. Imagine for a moment that seventy years of military occupation in the Israeli-occupied territories never happened, but theres still a BDS movement. Then I think we would have good reason to call that movement anti-Semitic. As Emily Dische-Becker observed to Dirk Peitz of the weekly Die Zeit, its increasingly becoming impossible in Germany to advocate for the two-state solution, which is the official position of the German government, or take the positions of the United Nations. But can it be German raison dtat to share, in the name of the past, the positions of the radical right or the Israeli settler movement?

PH: The criticism during the run-up to the documenta was sparked by connections to the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement, whose demands, though somewhat vagueamong them are a cultural boycott against Israel and Israeli institutions and sometimes also the exclusion of Israeli artistsmay ultimately amount to the end of the state of Israel.

AF: I myself am not a supporter of BDS, but I think the sweeping condemnations of the movement as anti-Semitic are highly problematic, especially in light of the fact that there are Jews and Israelis among its participants and sympathizers, who surely dont call into question Israels right to exist. Thats a German defensive attitude, a face-saving pretext for a perpetrator nation. The question of Palestinians right of return, in any case, is not something we in Germany can resolve by excluding artists who have signed one or another open letter. People keep arguing that the right of return for Palestinians would endanger the existence of the Jewish state of Israel. But the consequence cant be that any form of forced displacement and expropriation, then and now, is justified and that merely mentioning these things is anti-Israel. Those are German conflations that even Israeli intellectuals often observe with incredulity and bafflement.

PH: You were involved in the GG 5.3 Weltoffenheit Initiative, which rejected the Federal Governments resolution condemning BDS as anti-Semitic. The initiatives statement mentions the challenges that cultural institutions face in communicating the memory of the Shoah to international partners. In the documenta debate, too, critics of anti-Semitism have often been disparaged as parochial. Is the German culture of remembrance incompatible with decolonial thinking?

AF: I would wish that more room would open up for nuanced analyses. I think that frontline is a construction, because theres no longer a defensible scholarly basis for it. Historians have documented the connections between the Nazi genocide and colonial history, and far from simply negating the singularity of the Shoah, their scholarship has helped throw its contours into sharper relief. The Nazis redemptory anti-Semitism was one thing; imperial and racist genocide on the edges of colonies, as in Namibia, was something else. But redemptory anti-Semitism was importantly also an imperialist and racist genocide in the age of the European colonial powers. To characterize what makes the Shoah singular, we need to embed it in colonial history while also recognizing the unique features of the strategy that served to justify anti-Semitism, which is to say, the way anti-Semitism was cast in the vlkisch discourse as part and parcel of a history of salvation.

PH: In the planned discussion event series to accompany the documenta, you were supposed to moderate a panel about German and international conceptions of anti-Semitism and racism. How do the debates here differ from those elsewhere?

AF: Thats a complex issue thats reflected quite clearly in the history of documenta. There have always been artists who delved into the history of National Socialism, doing research and uncovering continuities. Meanwhile, from the start documenta itself was part of a history of the rehabilitation of Germany as a cultural nation: How does the ostensible inversion of degenerate art transform the perpetrator nation into a leading art nation? Of course, that kind of recoding is a much more complex process, but in the Cold War, the autonomy of art was seized on as a way to exorcize the specters of the past. The generation of 68 then thoroughly scrambled this constellation before embracing the autonomy of art with unprecedented fervor. The result was a depoliticization thats now coming back to haunt us. The exhibition Parapolitics at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in 2017, which I cocurated, studied this shift. Right now, art institutions are under enormous pressure because the narratives from which they draw their legitimacy are eroding and being challenged by protests and social justice movements. Theyre compelled to think hard about what they do and about their foundations. For an example in Germany, just look at the debate around the Humboldt Forum.

PH: So in which ways do institutions need to change?

AF: Theres a been movement within the art world to recognize and critique its own Eurocentric basic premises. Think, for example, of the exhibition Primitivism in 20th Century Art at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1984, or of Magiciens de la terre at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in 1990. In a certain sense, the current documenta is a culmination of that movement. Whats simplistically called postcolonialism is the attempt to mount a structural critique of a much longer history of modernityand when that critique looks at what happened after 1945, it doesnt see a simple deliverance from racism and anti-Semitism.

PH: What might the next documenta look like?

AF: I believe a plural society must be capable of living with dissensus. Thats also the position the interim director is defending with great elegance. Whether documenta can retain its global significance is a good question. An essay by the French art historian Catherine Dossin has raised the question of the German century.

PH: Did she mean the century of documenta?

AF: Documenta is representative of the obsession with being world championworld champion in coming to terms with the past, world champion in exhibition-making. Athletic achievements were one form of compensation for the global conquest that eluded Germany, and the artistic conquests also always had an air of athletic competition. Dossin places that in the context of the question of the symbolic transfer that took place between the US and Germany. Avant-gardists who, before the Second World War, participated in a predominantly anti-bourgeois, revolutionary practice became poster children after the war, agents of a re-civilization under the aegis of the bourgeoisie. Those days are now gonethe geopolitical premises and the conceptions of subjectivity behind it have become untenable.

PH: And after the German century, will there still be a documenta?

AF: What were witnessing, especially in conservative cultural criticism, is old structures and privileges not wanting to die. But perhaps were going to need another documenta to make clear that the art world in its present-day form, between the market and the institutions, has no future. In the art worldbut not in the one that ruangrupa invitedthe market, which derives value from speculation, and the art world supported by public funding are drifting apart. The gulf has grown too wide for any one star curator to bridge by power of their charisma. When it comes to questions of how to frame something in the context of global history, also beyond the narrow confines of contemporary art, well need new symbioses. Those symbioses are emerging in the interactions between activism, local art institutions, and the reassessment of colonial historyand no longer primarily in art.

Translated from the German by Gerrit Jackson

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Anselm Franke on the Future of documenta: Were witnessing old structures not wanting to die - Notes - E-Flux

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Posted By admin on October 1, 2022

The decision of whether to post the segment was kicked from Rising producers to The Hills Editor-in-Chief Bob Cusack. In a call with Halper on Wednesday, he framed Halpers segment as similar to an op-ed submission, telling her that The Hill accepts some submissions and rejects other submissions, and that this right extends to Hill TV journalism as well.

Producers told Halper that perhaps a standard segment would work, but when Halper proposed to a Nexstar executive that she use her next appearance for such a segment, she was told her services would no longer be needed.

We wanted to let you know that we will not be needing you to appear on Rising tomorrow am, a Nexstar executive told Halper Wednesday in an email she provided to The Intercept, asking for the executives name to be kept private. Please feel free to submit any unpaid invoices for your work on Rising. We wish you all the best.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib has been condemned by some over comments she made about Israel. Heres CNNs Jake Tapper reporting on what the Michigan Democrat said and the response it prompted.

Im not a Jewish colleague of Tlaib, but I am a Jew and I am outraged. Not by Tlaib, but by the attacks on Tlaib. Rashida Tlaib is saying that Israel is an apartheid state and that people who claim to have progressive values cannot support an apartheid state. No matter how loose a definition of progressive we use, it certainly excludes supporting a racist apartheid system.

Whats outrageous is that Tlaib would be pilloried over her comments. Whats outrageous is that the Anti-Defamation Leagues Jonathan Greenblatt would claim that Israel is not an apartheid government. Whats outrageous is that Jake Tapper would accept Greenblatts judgment as the truth and not propaganda that needed to be pushed back against.

I understand that Greenblatt and perhaps Tapper feel like Israel is not an apartheid state but unfortunately for them, apartheid isnt about your feelings. Its about facts.

So lets look at the facts on the ground.

First of all, what is apartheid?

Apartheid is an Afrikaans word that means apartness. It was the official policy in South Africa from 1948 and 1994, allowing white South Africans, in the minority, to rule over and discriminate against the vast majority of Black South Africans.

But apartheid doesnt just apply to South Africa. In 1973, the U.N. defined the crime of apartheid as including similar policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination as practiced in Southern Africa, as well as any inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them. In 1998, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defined apartheid as inhumane acts of a character that are committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.

These inhuman acts include, among others infliction upon the members of a racial group or groups of serious bodily or mental harm, by the infringement of their freedom or dignity, or by subjecting them to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment; By arbitrary arrest and illegal imprisonment of the members of a racial group or groups. Any legislative measures and other measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country and the deliberate creation of conditions preventing the full development of such a group or groups, in particular by denying to members of a racial group or groups basic human rights and freedoms, including the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence, the right to freedom of opinion and expression, and the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association. Any measures including legislative measures, designed to divide the population along racial lines by the creation of separate reserves and ghettos for the members of a racial group or groups, the prohibition of mixed marriages among members of various racial groups, the expropriation of landed property belonging to a racial group or groups or to members thereof.

Israels own laws certainly fit this definition of apartheid.

Look at the Law of Return of 1950 and tell me its not apartheid. The law allows any Jew, which means anyone with one Jewish grandparent, the right to move to Israel and automatically become citizens of Israel. It gives their spouses that right too, even if theyre not Jewish. Palestinians, of course, lack that right.

Lest you had any doubts about that, the Israeli Citizenship Law of 1952 deprived Palestinian refugees and their descendants of legal status, the right to return and all other rights in their homeland. It also defined Palestinians present in Israel as Israeli citizens without a nationality and group rights.

These laws together obviously fit into the International Criminal Courts apartheid criteria: The Israeli laws prohibit members of a racial group the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence.

The Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law of 2003, which was reauthorized in March of this year, makes people who live in the West Bank and Gaza Strip ineligible for the automatic granting of Israeli citizenship and residency permits that are usually available through marriage to an Israeli citizen. Not only can non-Israeli Jews not get Israeli citizenship through their Israeli spouses, but in some cases they cant live with them in Israel.

More recently, the controversial Nation State Law established that The fulfillment of the right of national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people. It also stipulated,The state views Jewish settlement as a national value and will labor to encourage and promote its establishment and development. It cancels the status of Arabic as an official language, and omits all mention of Israel as a democracy, the equality of its citizens, and the existence of the Palestinian population.

This legal obliteration of Palestinians clearly fulfills the U.N.s definition of apartheid, dividing the population along racial lines by the creation of separate reserves and ghettos for the members of a racial group or groups.

These are just some of the reasons that human rights organizations havedeclared Israel an apartheid state. Of course it should come as no surprise that Palestinian human rights organizations have been calling Israels government an apartheid one for decades. Al Haq, Al Mezans Center for Human Rights, Adalah: the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, and Addameer: Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association have documented Israeli apartheid.

More recently, organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have also conceded that Israel enacts apartheid policies.

Israels own human rights organization BTselem has declared, The Israeli regime enacts an apartheid regime. BTselem reached the conclusion that the bar for defining the Israeli regime as an apartheid regime has been met after considering the accumulation of policies and laws that Israel devised to entrench its control over Palestinians. BTselem divides the way Israeli apartheid works into four areas:

Land Israel works to Judaize the entire area, treating land as a resource chiefly meant to benefit the Jewish population. Since 1948, Israel has taken over 90% of the land within the Green Line and built hundreds of communities for the Jewish population. Since 1967, Israel has also enacted this policy in the West Bank, building more than 280 settlements for some 600,000 Jewish Israeli citizens. Israel has not built a single community for the Palestinian population in the entire area stretching from the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River (with the exception of several communities built to concentrate the Bedouin population after dispossessing them of most of their property rights).

Citizenship Jews living anywhere in the world, their children and grandchildren and their spouses are entitled to Israeli citizenship. In contrast, Palestinians cannot immigrate to Israeli-controlled areas, even if they, their parents or their grandparents were born and lived there. Israel makes it difficult for Palestinians who live in one of the units it controls to obtain status in another, and has enacted legislation that prohibits granting Palestinians who marry Israelis status within the Green Line.

Freedom of movement Israeli citizens enjoy freedom of movement in the entire area controlled by Israel (with the exception of the Gaza Strip) and may enter and leave the country freely. Palestinian subjects, on the other hand, require a special Israeli-issued permit to travel between the units (and sometimes inside them), and exit abroad also requires Israeli approval.

Political participation Palestinian citizens of Israel may vote and run for office, but leading politicians consistently undermine the legitimacy of Palestinian political representatives. The roughly five million Palestinians who live in the Occupied Territories, including East Jerusalem, cannot participate in the political system that governs their lives and determines their future. They are denied other political rights as well, including freedom of speech and association.

Israeli officials and politicians, too, have described their own country as an apartheid state.

Former attorney general Michael Ben-Yair wrote in 2002, we established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories immediately following their capture. That oppressive regime exists to this day.

Zehava Galon, former chair of Israels Meretz party, said in 2006, Israel was relegated to the level of an apartheid state.

In 2007, Israels former education minister Shulamit Aloni wrote, the state of Israel practices its own, quite violent, form of apartheid with the native Palestinian population.

In 2008, former environment minister Yossi Sarid said, what acts like apartheid, is run like apartheid and harasses like apartheid, is not a duck it is apartheid.

Even Israels prime ministers have used the A word. In a recently published 1976 interview, assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said,if we dont want to get to apartheid I dont think its possible to contain over the long term, a million and a half [more] Arabs inside a Jewish state.

In 2007 yet another prime minister, Ehud Olmert,warned, If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished. Well, Israel isnt finished, but they do face a South African-style struggle.

Prime Minister Ehud Baraksaid in 2010, As long as in this territory west of the Jordan river there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic. If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.

Surely South African leaders who suffered, struggled, and finally destroyed apartheid in their nation understood what apartheid is. And the great South African leaders Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu saw Israel policies as apartheid. In 1997 Mandela said, The U.N. took a strong stand against apartheid; and over the years, an international consensus was built, which helped to bring an end to this iniquitous system. But we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.

In 2013, Desmond Tutu recalled being struck by the similarities between what he experienced in apartheid South Africa and what he observed in Israel.

To my friends in the Democratic Party who want to support Israeland who who want be progressives, it is important to listen to what international law, Israeli politicians and South Africans leaders and apartheid survivors say about the apartheid system in Israel. But we would all do well to look at what South Africa did with its apartheid system. Simply put, it left apartheid behind.

So the question we should be asking ourselves as progressives and Americans and some of us as Jews is not how to excoriate Rashida Tlaib for pointing out the obvious, or how to turn all criticisms of Israel as challenges to Israels right to exist or as expressions of anti-Semitism. Rather, the question to ask is how an apartheid-free Israel would look.

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Posted By admin on October 1, 2022

The three two-hour episodes of The U.S. and the Holocaust, a documentary by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein, debuted on PBS beginning Sept. 18.

Toward the end of The U.S. and the Holocaust, Ken Burns new documentary, the audience hears the last entry in the wartime diary of Anne Frank: Its a wonder I havent abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.

Moments later, the historian Deborah Lipstadt appears onscreen to declare that these words are not the story of the Holocaust. The American reaction to the German campaign to exterminate Europes Jews, the principle subject of the film, does not redound to our credit, she says.

Of all the films Burns has made, this is the timeliest and most disturbing. It tells two intertwined stories in graphic detail: Adolf Hitlers maniacal determination to murder the Jews of Europe and the forces that kept the United States from doing more to stop him. As the film notes in closing, the anti-Semitic rants and lies in the America of 1930s and 40s still echo in the nations political climate in 2022.

The Statue of Liberty graces the screen more than once during the film. Americans take such pride in this national symbol that 3.5 million of them visit it each year. Many identify with the lines of Emma Lazarus sonnet hailing the majestic statue as the Mother of Exiles:

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, tempest-tost, to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

The Burns film clarified how short of these ideals America fell during the years before World War II. The Ku Klux Klan re-emerged as a murderous vigilante force in the 1920s. Much of the country supported euthanasia to strengthen the gene pool, racial segregation, the social ostracism of Jews, and the virulent anti-Semitism of Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh, among others. Hitler-loving German Bunds drew more than 20,000 people to a 1938 rally at Madison Square Garden.

Rolled out one after another in the film, these strains of hatred portray an America far removed from the country described in high school history books.

After Kristallnacht, the Nazi rampage of rape and terror that killed hundreds of Jews and destroyed 2,500 Jewish-owned businesses in Germany, survivors flocked to U.S. embassies seeking to immigrate. The magazine Christian Century warned that letting in more Jews would only exacerbate our Jewish problem. The Daughters of the American Revolution and the American Legion also opposed raising the immigration quota for Jews.

In addition to expert historians and contemporary film footage, Burns and his partners use the fate of families to tell their story. These include Otto Frank, Annes father, and the Franks Amsterdam neighbor-in-hiding Elfriede Geiringer, whose father and brother died in the camps. Now 100 years old, Guy Stern, the only member of his family to escape, returned to Germany in 1944 as a U.S. Army linguist to interrogate German POWs. If I can shorten the war by an hour, maybe I can save a family, he told himself. He broke into tears at a liberated concentration camp. It was skeletons you were talking to, he said.

Daniel Mendelsohn undertook a global odyssey to learn what had happened to his family. The Lost: A Search for Six of the Six Million, his book about this quest, lends particularity to the unimaginable death toll. In the film, he suggests one reason Americans failed to comprehend the plight of the Jews: As it was happening to us, we couldnt believe it. If we couldnt believe it, how could anyone else believe it?

The film describes the evolution of Hitlers thinking. When Germany annexed Austria in 1938, adding 139,000 Jews to his realm, he realized that his thirst for territorial expansion, especially in the East, would increase this population. Extermination became his solution. Four years later, when the Germans discovered that Zyklon could kill Jews for a penny a victim, he ordered a major escalation of the gassing.

By then, President Franklin D. Roosevelt knew what was happening, and much of the American public did, too. In November of 1942, the New York Herald-Tribune exposed the existence of the death camps on its front page. Millions of Jews and others are being gathered up and killed, Edward R. Murrow, the popular radio reporter, told his listeners.

The United States had been at war for less than a year, and its mass bombing of Germany had scarcely begun. D-Day remained a year and a half away. The film describes both Roosevelts dilemma and the lingering anti-Semitism in high places. The president knew he could not divert his military to save the Jews, and he saw no practical way to accomplish this. He aimed instead to win the war as soon as possible and punish the murderers of the Jews afterward. Meanwhile, as rabbis marched on Washington pleading for action, some State Department officials lied about the situation and resisted raising the Jewish immigration quota.

In 1944, Americans at last acknowledged the tragedy, but as the film captures the moment, even this did not induce a willingness to act. Seventy percent of respondents told pollsters they knew Jews were being murdered, but they greatly underestimated the scale of the killing, estimating the death toll at a million when 5 million had already been exterminated. Just 5 percent of those polled favored allowing more European Jews to come to America.

In the films closing scenes, the horrors of Nazi Germany echo in the American present as white supremacists converge on Charlottesville, racists carry out mass shootings of Jews and Black people, Donald Trump scorns immigrants, and a mob assaults the Capitol. Comparing the past to the present so directly is rare in a film by Burns, but sadly, it seems relevant here.

Even when his films stay in their moment, the past echoes in the present. In this one, Daniel Mendelsohn suns up one lesson of studying the Holocaust: The fragility of human behavior is the one thing you really learn. These people we see in the sepia photographs, theyre no different from us. You look at your neighbors, the people at the dry cleaners, the waiters in the restaurant, thats who these people were. Dont kid yourself.

The New Hampshire Bulletin, like the Idaho Capital Sun, is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Hampshire Bulletin maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Dana Wormald for questions: [emailprotected]. Follow New Hampshire Bulletin on Facebook and Twitter.

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Posted By admin on September 29, 2022

Literary critic, poet andWall Street Journaleditor Adam Kirsch visited Yeshiva University on September 21 for a conversation with students from theZahava and Moshael Straus Center for Torah and Western Thoughtand theJay and Jeannie Schottenstein Honors Program. Kirsch spoke with Straus Center Program Officer Tal Fortgang and a room full of Yeshiva College students about his book,Come and Hear: What I Saw in My Seven-and-a-Half-Year Journey Through the Talmud, and his series of columns forTableton hisDaf Yomi(daily Talmud study)excursion.

Kirsch began by explaining what motivated him to take on the project ofDaf Yomias a non-Orthodox Jew, literary critic and novice in the world of Talmud study. He was inspired by the 2012Siyum HaShas(celebration of the completion of theDaf Yomicycle)and figured he could gain insights into what animated todays Orthodox Jews, as well as how the ancient sages continue to exert an influence over Jewish cultureobservant or nottoday.

He immediately began receiving feedback on his discoveries, as chronicled in a regular column atTablet. Kirsch reports hearing from yeshiva students and non-observant Jews alike, and began to see his mission as acting as a scout for people with backgrounds similar to his ownthose who had not encountered the Talmuds unique mode of argument or its assumptions about the intermingling of the natural and supernatural worlds.

Kirsch emphasized to the students in attendance that an element of Talmud study that stands out to an outsider is that the argument is often an end in and of itself. He also pointed out that because the Talmud is more than just a code of lawit touches on so many different topics, involves many indeterminate arguments and records many episodes not legal in natureit allows Jews in every era to share reference points that can unify a people who may be geographically and philosophically disparate. For instance, the term tikkun olam meant one thing in the time of the Talmud, another thing in the Medieval era and another thing to many contemporary Jews. Whether or not Jews today are using the term in accordance with its original meaning, they still feel the need to ground their understanding in a term that resonates with other Jews.

Students eagerly peppered Kirsch with questions about the past, present and future of Talmud study. Kirsch noted in response that study of the Gemara is undergoing a renaissance today among observant Jews, academics and people simply interested in understanding the development of Jewish thought. He contrasted this renaissance with early American Jewish literature, which derided Talmud study as backward and barbaric, a symbol of the old world American Jews were leaving behind.

Today, he concluded, the Talmud is available in many languages, on many platforms, with many commentaries, at the push of a button. Whether the democratization of Talmud study will turn out to be good for the Jews or not is yet to be seen.

The event was the latest in a series sponsored or co-sponsored by the Straus Center and Schottenstein Honors Program. Recent events included a conversation with theJerusalem Posts Zvika Klein and a dinner discussion withTablets Liel Leibovitz and YUs own Rabbi Daniel Feldman.

You can learn more about the Straus Center by signing up for our newsletterhere. Be sure to also like us onFacebook, follow us onTwitterandInstagramand connect with us onLinkedIn.

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Posted By admin on September 29, 2022

Dirshuni: Contemporary Womens MidrashEdited by Tamar BialaBrandeis University Press, 304 pp., $30.00

When the ancient rabbis had a question about the Torahan important detail that seemed to be missing, an inconsistency between two passages, even a redundant word or versethey would often solve the problem by writing a midrash, or story, filling in the missing piece or reconciling the seeming contradiction. One well-known example of such a midrash is the story of the young Abraham smashing the idols in his fathers workshop, then claiming that the largest idol had done it, so as to trick his father into admitting the idols were merely powerless, human-made statues. People often assume this is part of the Bible story, but in fact it is the rabbis creative answer to a question not answered in the text: Why did God choose Abraham to convert the heathens to monotheism?

Many of these invented stories reflect sensibilities that bother contemporary women, and women have responded by composing a rich variety of feminist midrash in response. (I take pride in thinking I have been part of this effort, particularly in my two novels that seek to flesh out the life of the otherwise unnamed Rav Hisdas daughter, exploring why the Talmud would describe her as having married two of her fathers best students after being asked, Which do you want? and responding boldly, Both of them.)

For an example of the conversation between ancient and modern values in midrash, consider the story of Lilith. Traditional rabbis wanted to reconcile the two different accounts of the creation of man and woman that appear in Genesis: Chapter 1 describes Gods creation of man and woman at the same time, but Chapter 2 recounts how God makes man in the Garden of Eden and then creates woman as mans mate later.

The rabbis wondered what happened to that first womanwhy was Adam alone again and in need of a mate? They contrived the legend of Lilith, created as Adams equal, who left him when he insisted on dominating her. In this tradition, Lilith became a baby-killing demon, while Eve, created from Adams body in the second story, was more willing to submit to him and thus more acceptable to the ancient rabbis. In 1972, though, feminist theologian Judith Plaskow wrote The Coming of Lilith, which transforms the fearsome, demonic Lilith into a wise and brave woman. Instead of a rival to be feared, she becomes Eves friend and empowerer.

How might women have told their stories if they were central characters in the tradition?

Dirshuni: Contemporary Womens Midrash is the long-anticipated English edition of a collection of midrash composed by Israeli women. Three of the Dirshuni authors are rabbis; all are educators, many with advanced degrees. Using the classical forms developed by the ancient rabbis, they seek to fill what the book calls the missing half of the sacred Jewish bookshelf. Like other feminist approaches to the Torah, Dirshuni asks: How might women have told their stories if they were central, rather than peripheral, characters in the tradition?

As with traditional midrash collections, this volume begins with Genesis and Exodus and continues through Prophets and Writings. Here the similarity ends, as the following seven chapters are arranged by subject, including Fertility and Parenthood, Holidays, Inequality in Jewish Law and The Rabbinic Court. Each is fashioned in the traditional form: first the text, then the midrash explaining or expanding on it, then commentary on its implications, legal or otherwise.

Some of the authors retell stories in a way that highlights womens pain in greater detail, creating sympathy and revising traditional judgments. Retired high school teacher Ruti Timor offers a heart-rending alternative explanation of how Lots wife was transformed into a pillar of salt after she looked back at Sodom:

She was unaware of Gods command not to look behind (Genesis 19:17). Lot said to his wife, quickwell run for our lives or be killed. She said, well save ourselves, and our [married] daughters will stay here? He walked sure-footed and she lagged behind. Her heart was heavy upon her, she looked back and saw her city, her family, and her property going up in flames. Tear after tear dripped from her eyes, and the tears grew fuller and fuller, stronger and stronger; until they became a pillar of salt. She stumbled and fell, and stirred no more. And Lot did not look back. Our Sages said, She sinned and with salt was punished. And I say, she sinned not, but was punished all the same.

Other retellings add new takes on long-standing debates, such as whether Sarah was complicit in Abrahams decision to obey the command to sacrifice their son Isaac. Tamar Biala, a feminist scholar and longtime Torah teacher who spearheaded both the Hebrew and English Dirshuni projects and edited this volume, imagines the voices of various female biblical figures reacting to the verse describing Abrahams early morning departure (Genesis 22:3):

And where was Sarah at the time? Jezebel said: Sarah was of one mind with Abraham and she too sought not to withhold her only son, whom she loved. For Abraham and Sarah both worshipped the same God, and would convert people to Him; he the men, and she the women. Dinah said: Sarah was in the tent and didnt know of their departure, for ever since she had returned from the palace of Avimelekh, her husband had told her All the princesses treasure is inward (Ps. 45:14). She would hide within the tent and no longer took notice of other people. The Great Woman of Shuman said: Sarah hurried after Abraham to stop him from slaughtering her son, but judges and officers at the gates prevented her.

Biala, in her own commentary, concludes by blaming God:

for the Holy Blessed One had told Abraham Whatever Sarah tells you, listen to her voice (Gen. 21:12). But He had not said those words to herAgainst a patriarchal reality in which women truly do have the power to intervene and avert catastropheyet they fail to act because [they] are unaware of their own strength.

Some midrashim in this collection go further and depict women studying together in the Beit Midrashah shel BeruriahBeruriahs Study House, an imaginary yeshiva headed by Beruriah, the learned wife of Talmudic sage Rabbi Meir. This allows for narratives in which women are shown studying text and contributing legal rulings as in classical Talmudic passages. One of my favorites, by Rivkah Lubitch, a scholar and advocate for women in Israels religious courts, is about mamzerut, the issues surrounding the treatment of mamzerim, or bastardschildren born to parents in a forbidden union, who are then, under religious law, prohibited from marrying other Jews. In Lubitchs midrash, Moses ascends to heaven to write down the Torah as God dictates it, but becomes distressed:

He came to the verse Do not uncover the nakedness of your fathers sister, she is your fathers near kinswoman (Leviticus 18:12), and he said, isnt my mother my fathers aunt? After all, Amram, my father, is the son of Kehat and grandson of LeviAnd Yocheved, my mother, is the daughter of LeviMoses felt faint. He came to the verse No mamzer will enter the assembly of God, even to the tenth generation (Deuteronomy 23:3)He said: Could I and my siblings, Aaron and Miriam, be mamzerim? He grew weak. He wept and wept

He [traveled forward in time] and sat in the beit midrash of Beruriah. He heard a woman ask: Why is the law of mamzer not practiced today? And they answered her: Because we do not receive testimony on a mamzer; because it has already been decided that the entire community are presumed to be mamzerim, and are permitted to one another. Mosess mind was eased.

In a commentary following this story, Lubitch shows how one might use this midrash as a basis for contending with the mamzerut problem in religious law today. She imagines the court adopting a legal principle based on the precedent that Jacob violated the prohibition against marrying two sisters, Leah and Rachel, during their lifetimes:

the halakha maintains that the entire Jewish community is presumed to be bastards and thus all are permitted to marry one anotherThroughout the generations, rabbis have made such general statements and legal presumptionsSimilarly the entire Jewish community is presumed to have been rendered impure by contact with the dead, such that most of the purity and impurity laws no longer apply.

Not every midrash in Dirshuni is so encouraging. Jerusalem prosecutor Oshrat Shohams trilogy of tales in the Rape and Incest chapter (The Fathers Scream: Concealing and Revealing, The Mothers Scream: Uncovering and Expulsion and The Womans Scream: Cover-Up and Tikkun), where each victim is ignored, shamed or both, upset me so much I could barely skim them.

Upon reflection, however, I think they were written to make readers outraged and empathetic, to force changes in attitude and to demand justice. By contrast, two contributions to the chapter on post-Holocaust theology are more comforting, drawing on texts about Noahs dove and raven and on passages from the Song of Songs to emphasize how important it is for humanity to feel Gods presence, especially in a difficult, frightening and painful period. The human tendency is to forget God and ignore His presence when all is well; the closeness between God and humanity depends on both working to ensure that the bond endures.

These are merely a taste of the formidable resources in Dirshuni. While scholars will relish the books nuances, it is the less experienced Torah student who will learn most from this wealth of new insights into the tradition.

Maggie Anton is an author of historical fiction, including the trilogy Rashis Daughters and The Choice: A Novel of Love, Faith and the Talmud.

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